The long journey from China's Cultural Revolution to reaching out with the Christian message to some of the 500,000 or so Chinese-speaking Melburnians reaches an important milestone on Saturday for David Xu.
He will be ordained an Anglican priest on Saturday November 29 at St Paul's Cathedral. Xu, whose mother was a Christian in China in the 1970s, came to Australia a dozen years ago and found his desire to serve growing.
"Of nearly half a million Chinese-speaking people in Melbourne, fewer than 20,000 are Christian," he says. "Anglican churches in the Melbourne diocese have only six Mandarin-speaking congregations and two Cantonese-speaking."
David Xu will be one of 15 men and women whose spiritual journey culminates with their ordination at 11am on Saturday. They are 10 men and five women, aged 24 to 59, with an average age of 41. They have left careers in psychology, physiotherapy and teaching, to name a few, and will mostly go into parish ministry, though some will be chaplains.
Matching the modern church, the new priests are ethnically diverse, with Sudanese, Karen and Chinese alongside the Anglo-Australians.
One of the latter is Anne Kennedy, whose family tree boasts several Anglican priests. She has enjoyed ministering at three aged care facilities.
"So much has been taken away from some of these people – their homes, their independence, the parishes where they may have worshipped all their lives," she says. "It is wonderful to be the Church coming to them."
The ordination service will be led by Melbourne Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier, starting at 10.30am.